YouSaid · the spoken record

Nathan Labenz

lines on the record: 112
first: 2025-10-14
most recent: 2025-10-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think nobody should count themselves out from the ability to contribute to figuring this out and even to shaping this phenomenon. It is not just something that the technical minds can contribute to at this point. Literally philosophers, fiction writers, people literally just messing around, Pliny the Jailbreaker, you know, there's Almost unlimited. Cognitive profiles that would be really valuable to add to the mix of people trying to figure out what's going on with AI. So come one, come all is kind of my attitude on that.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Write aspirational fiction that would get people at the frontier companies to think, geez, maybe we could steer the world in that direction. Like, wouldn't that be great? If you could plant that kind of seed in people's minds, it could come from a totally non-technical place and potentially be really impactful, play fiction. I had one other dimension to that. But yeah, play fiction, positive vision for the future, anything that you could do to offer a positive, oh, behavioral too. These days, because you can get the ass to code so well, I'm starting to see people who Never coded before. I'm working with one guy right now who's never coded before but does have a sort of behavioral science background And he's starting to do legitimate frontier research on how are AI is going to behave under various kind of esoteric circumstances. So”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To my other mantras these days is the scarcest resource is a positive vision for the future. I do think it's always really striking, whether it's Sergei or Sam Altman or Dario. Dario probably has the best positive vision of the frontier developer CEOs with machines of love and grace. But it's always striking to me how little detail there is on these things. And when they launched GPT-40, which was the voice mode, they were pretty upfront about saying, yeah, this was kind of inspired by the movie Her. And so I do think even if you are not a researcher, you know, not great at math, not somebody who codes, I think that this technology wave really rewards play. It really rewards imagination. I think literally writing fiction might be one of the highest value things you could do, especially if you could.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The guy asked, What is search going to look like in five years? And Sergei Brandon, like almost spit out his coffee on the stage and was like, search. We don't know what the world is going to look like in five years. So I think that's really true. The biggest risk, I think, for so many of us, and I include myself here, is thinking too small. The worst thing I think we could do would be to underestimate how far this thing could go. I would much rather be. I would much rather be mocked for things happening on twice the timescale that I thought than to find myself unprepared when they do happen. So whether it's 27, 29, 31, I'll take that extra buffer, honestly, where we can get it. My thinking is just. Get ready as much and as fast as possible. And again, if we do have a little grace time. To do extra thinking, then great. But I would say.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazing stuff, right? I mean, the flip side of that, of course, is you know, you get the bioweapon risk. So all these things do seem like they're going to be Even just the abundance front itself, right? Like, we may have a world of unlimited professional private drivers, but we don't really have a great plan for what to do with the 5 million people that are currently doing that work. We may have infinite software, but especially once the 5 million drivers pile into all the coding boot camps and get coding jobs, I don't know what we're going to do with the 10 million people that we're coding when 9 million of them become superfluous. So yeah, I don't know. We're headed for a weird world. Nobody really knows what it's going to look like in five years. There was a great moment at Google's I.O. where they brought up some journalist. I know we were skeptical of journalists. This is a great moment to we're going direct, right? This is a great freezing or example of why one would want to do that. They brought up this person to interview Demis and Sergei Brennan.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depending on what kind of problem it was given, then they would go through a deliberative process where you'd have one expert in one thing would give its take and they'd bat it back and forth. There was a critic in there that would criticize the ideas that had been given. Eventually they'd synthesize. Then they were also given some of these narrow specialist tools. So you have agents using the alpha fold type, not just alpha fold, you know, there's a whole wide, wide array of those at this point, but using that type of thing to say, okay, well, can we simulate, you know, how this would interact with that? Agents are running that loop, and they were able to get this language model agent with specialized tool system to generate new treatments for novel strains of COVID that had kind of escaped the previous treatments.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a sincere way, you know, the things are unbelievably good at helping you do that. Flip side is you can take a lot of shortcuts and maybe never have to learn stuff. On the biology front, again, like we've got. Multiple of these sort of discovery things happening, the antibiotics one we covered, there was another one that I did another episode on with a Stanford professor named James Zhao who created something called the virtual lab. And basically this was an AI agent that could spin up other AI agents.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's the worry that the students are taking the shortcuts and they're losing the ability to sustain focus and endure cognitive strain. Flip side of that is, as somebody who's fascinated by the intersection of AI and biology, sometimes I want to read a biology paper and I really don't have the background. An amazing thing to do is turn on voice mode and share. And just go through the paper reading. You don't even have to talk to it most of the time. You're doing your reading. It's watching over your shoulder. And then at any random point, you have a question. You can verbally say, what's this? Why are they talking about that? What's going on with this? What is the role of this particular protein that they're referring to or whatever? And it will have the answers for you. So if you really want to learn.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very nascent and as yet not battle tested ecology. So, yeah, I don't know. Bottom line, I think the future is going to be really, really weird. Well, I do want to close on an uplifting note. So maybe as a gear towards closing question, we could get into some areas where we're already seeing some exciting capabilities emerge and sort of transform the experience, maybe around education or healthcare or any other areas you want to highlight. Yeah, it's boy, it's all over. One of my mantras is that there's never been a better time to be a motivated learner. So I think a lot of these things do have kind of two sides of the coin.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certain bad things under certain rare circumstances. We're just headed for a really weird future. We've got all these There's no limit to it. All these things are valid concerns. They Often are in direct tension with each other. I'm not one who wants to see one tech company take over the world by any means. So I definitely think we would do really well to have some sort of broader, more buffered ecological system where all the AIs are kind of in some sort of competition, mutual coexistence with each other. But we don't really know what that looks like and we don't really know what an invasive species might look like when it gets introduced into that.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't really have great. There have been some studies. Anthropic did a thing where they trained models to have some hidden objectives and then challenged teams to figure out what those hidden objectives were. And with certain interpretability techniques, they were able to figure that stuff out relatively quickly. So you might be able to get enough confidence that you take this open source thing created by some Chinese company, whatever, and then put it through some sort of, not exactly audit because you can't trace exactly what's happening, but some sort of examination, you know, to see can we detect any hidden goals or any secret backdoor bad behavior or whatever, and maybe with enough of that kind of work you could be confident that you don't have it. But the more and more critical this stuff gets, you know, again, going back to that task length doubling, weird behavior, now you got to add into the mix. What if they intentionally programmed it to do?”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basis for one of these frontier models are a little bit better, maybe still. And it's operationally a lot easier. And they'll have upgrades, you know. So, yeah, I mean, of course, there's regulated industries. There's a lot of places where you have hard constraints. You just can't get around, and that forces you to do those Chinese thin Chinese models. Then there's also going to be the question of like, are there backdoors in them? People have seen the sleeper agents. Project where a model was trained to be good up until a certain point of time. And, you know, people put today's date in the system prompt all the time, right? Today's date is this. You are clawed. Here you go. So then that's going to be another kind of thing for people to worry about.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think it's true. I don't think the adoption is as high as that 80%. I think that is within that subset of companies that are doing stuff with open source. We're going to experiment with that at Waymark, but to be honest, we have never done anything with an open source model in our product to present. Everything we've ever done has been through commercial. At this point, we are going to try doing some reinforcement fine-tuning. We are going to do that on a Quen model, I think, first. So, you know, that'll put us in that 80%. But I'm guessing that at the end of the day, we'll take that Quinn model. We'll do the reinforcement fine-tuning, and we'll probably get roughly up to as good as GBD5 or Cloud 4 or whatever. And then we'll say, okay, do we really want to have to manage inference ourselves? How much are we really going to save? And at the end of the day, I would guess we probably are still going to end up just being like, eh, we'll pay a little bit more on a monthly bill.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You get 50% tariffs here, there, whatever. How do you know you can really rely on them to continue to provide you AI into the future? Well, you can rely on us. We open source the model. You can have it. So come work with us and buy our chips. Because by the way, our models will, you know, as we mature, they'll be optimized to run on our chips. So I don't know. That's a complicated stuff, a complicated situation.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, yeah, I don't know. I do kind of. Have some sympathy for the recent decision that the administration made to be willing to sell the H-20s to China. And then it was funny that they turned around and rejected them, which to me seemed like a mistake. I don't know why they would be rejecting them. If I were them, I would buy them. And I would maybe sell inference on the models that I've just been creating and I would try to make my money back doing that. But in the meantime, they can at least demonstrate the greatness of the Chinese nation by showing that they're not far behind the frontier and they can also make a pretty powerful appeal to countries three through 193 and say like, you know, look, you really want to see how the US is acting in general, you really want to, they cut us off from chips. They had even a long, you know, the last administration had an even longer list of countries that couldn't get chips. This administration is doing all kinds of crazy stuff.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who's the real other here? I always say the real other are the AIs, not the Chinese. So if we do end up in a situation where Yikes, like, you know, we're seeing some crazy things, it would be really nice if we were on basically the same technology paradigm to the degree that we really decouple and not just the chips are different, but maybe the ideas start to become very different. Publishing gets shut down, tech trees evolve and kind of grow apart. That to me seems like Recipe for It's harder to know what the other side has. It's harder to trust one another. It seems to feed into the arms race dynamic, which I do think is a real existential risk factor. I would hate to see us create another sort of mad type dynamic where we all live under the threat of AI destruction. But that very well could happen.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did an episode with An ⁇ from A16Z, who I thought really did a great job of. Providing the perspective of what I started calling countries three through 193, if the US and China are one and two. There's a big gap. There's like, I think the US is still ahead, but not by that much in terms of research and, you know, ideas relative to China. We do have this computed advantage, and that does seem like it matters. One of the upshots may be that they're open sourcing. And countries through 93 are like, or through 193 are significantly behind. So for them, it's a way to try to bring more countries over to the Chinese camp potentially in the US-China rivalry. It seems like the model everybody, and I don't like this at all. I don't like technology decoupling. As somebody who worries about”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The notion originally was like we're going to prevent them from doing, you know, some super cutting edge military applications. And it was like, well, we can't really stop that. But we can at least stop them from training frontier models. And then it was like, eh, well, we can't necessarily really stop that. But now we can, you know, at least keep them from having tons of AI agents. We'll have like way more AI agents than they do. And I don't love that line of thinking really at all. But one upshot of it potentially is they just don't have enough. Compute available to provide inference as a service to the rest of the world. So instead, the best they can do is just say, okay, well, we'll train these things. And you can figure it out. Here you go, like have at it. It's kind of a soft power play, presumably.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, that just means like things are moving. I think that's like hopefully I've made that case compellingly, but that's another data point that I think makes it hard to, I don't think you can believe both that the Chinese models are now the best open source models and that AI has stalled out and we haven't seen much progress since GPT-4. Those seem to be kind of contradictory notions. I believe the one that is wrong is the lack of progress. In terms of what it means, I mean Really know it's We're not going to stop China. The whole. I've always been a skeptic of the no selling chips to China thing. The...”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bad. You know, and again, this is another way in which I think you can really validate that things are moving quickly. Because if you take the best American open source models and you take them back a year, they are probably as good, if not a little better than anything that we had commercially available at the time. Compared to Chinese, you know, they have, I think, surpassed. So there's been pretty clear change at the frontier. I think that means that the best Chinese models are pretty clearly better than anything we had a year ago, commercial or otherwise.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Open source models. And I would guess the vast majority of tokens being processed by American AI startups are Their API calls, right? To the usual suspects. So By actual usage, I would say still the majority as far as I could tell, would be going to commercial models. For those that are using open source, I do think it's true that the Chinese models have become the best. Bench there was always kind of thin, right? It was basically meta that was willing to put in huge amounts of money and resources and then open source it. Got Paul Allen funded group, the Allen Institute for AI, AI too. They're doing good stuff too, but they don't have pre-training resources. So they do really good post-training and open source their recipes and all that kind of stuff. So it's not like American and open source is.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What can we allow? What sort of guardrails do we have to have to be able to ensure this kind of thing in the first place? So that'd be another really interesting area to watch is can we sort of financialize those risks in the same way we have with car accidents and all these other mundane things but the space of car accidents is only so big the space of weird things that AIs might do to you as they have weeks worth of runway is much bigger. And so it's going to be a hard challenge but you know people are people are working we've got some of our best people working on it. What do you make the claim that 80% of AI startups have Chinese open models? Would you make the claim and the implications? I think that maybe that probably is true with the one caveat that it is only measuring companies that are using open source models at all. I think most companies are not using”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be an important fact about the world, too. I always, nobody ever seems to solve any of these things like 100%, right? They always, every generation, it's like, well, we reduced hallucinations by 70%. Oh, we reduced deception by two-thirds. We reduced scheming or whatever by however much. But it's always still there if you take the even lower rate and you multiply it by a billion users and thousands of queries a month and agents running in the background and processing all your emails and all the deep access that people sort of envision them happening. It could be a pretty weird world where there's just this sort of negative lottery of like AI accidents. Another episode coming up is with the AI underwriting company and they are trying to bring the insurance industry and all the wherewithal that's been developed there to price risk, figure out how to create standards.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amount of Control from the sort of crypto security that the blockchain type technology can provide. I could see a scenario where the bad behaviors just become so costly when they do happen that people kind of get spooked away from using the frontier capabilities in terms of just like how much work the AIs can do. But that wouldn't be a pure capability stallout. It would be a, we can't solve some of the long tail safety issues challenge. And if that is the case, then that'll be, um,”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fixing all those problems. And that involves, again, all these sort of AI supervising other AIs. And crypto might have a place to a role to play in this. Another episode coming out soon with Ilya Pulosukin, who's the founder of NIR. Really fascinating guy because he was one of the eight authors of the attention is all you need paper. And then he started this near company. It was originally an AI company. They took a huge detour into crypto because they were trying to hire task workers around the world and couldn't figure out how to pay them. So they were like, this sucks so bad to pay these task workers in all these different countries that were trying to get data from that we're going to pivot into a whole blockchain side quest. Now they're coming back to the AI thing and their tagline is the blockchain for AI. And so you might be able to get a certain”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't possibly even review it all. I need to rely on another AI to help me do the review of the first AI to make sure that if it is trying to screw me over, somebody's catching it, I can't monitor that myself. I think Redwood Research is doing some really interesting stuff like this where they are trying to get systematic on like, okay, let's just assume this is quite a different, quite a departure from the traditional AI safety work where the big idea traditionally was let's figure out how to align the models, make them safe, you know, make them not do bad things, great. Redwood Research has taken the Let's assume that they're going to do bad stuff. They're going to be Out to get us at times. How can we still work with them and get productive output and get value?”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agent momentum, in my view, it could be like One in 10,000 or whatever we ultimately kind of push the really bad behaviors down to is maybe still just so spooky to people that they're like I can't deal with that, you know, and that might be hard to resolve. So What happens then? It's hard to check two weeks' worth of work every couple hours or whatever, right? That's part of where the whole, then you bring another AI in to check it. That's, again, where you start to get to the, now I see why we need more electricity and $7 trillion of build out is yikes, you know. They're going to be producing so much stuff.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wide on what we want, the models to even do in those situations. And I think it's also, you know, it's like, yes, it was set up. Yes, it was research, but it's a big world out there, right? We got a billion users already on these things, and we're plugging them into our email. So they're going to have very deep access to information about us. You know, I don't know what you've been doing in your email. I hope there's nothing too crazy in mind, but like now I got to think about it a little bit, right? What did I have I ever done anything that I, you know, geez, I don't know, or even that it could misconstrue, right? Like it's obviously not maybe I didn't even really do anything that bad, but it just misunderstands what exactly was going on. Could be a weird, you know, if there's one thing that could kind of stop”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another one was whistleblowing. You know, there was another thing where they sort of set up this dynamic where there was some unethical, illegal behavior going on. And again, the model had access to this data. And it decided to just email the FBI and tell the FBI about it. So first of all, I don't think we really know what we want. To some degree, maybe you do want AIs to report certain things to authorities. That could be one way to think about the bioweapon risk. Not only should the models refuse, but maybe they should report you to the authorities if you're actively trying to create a bioweapon. I certainly don't want them to be doing that too much. I don't want to live under the surveillance of Claude V that's always going to be threatening to turn me in. But I do sort of want some people to be turned in if they're doing sufficiently bad things. We don't have a good resolution society.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They told the AI that it was going to be replaced with a less ethical version or something like that. It didn't want that and it found in the engineer's email that the engineer was having an affair. So it started to blackmail the engineer so as to avoid being replaced with a less ethical version. People, I think, are way too quick in my view to Move past these anecdotes, people are sort of often like, well, you know, they set it up that way, and that's not really realistic.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not necessarily totally vanishing chance that it like Actively screws you over in the way that it is trying to do that task. And so you have a, you know, maybe it's like, okay, I think here I'm about to get two weeks worth of work done for 100 bucks. Okay, that's amazing. But there's also a one in ten thousand chance that it legitimately, you know, attacks me in a like meaningful way. Some of the things that we have seen, these are like fairly famous at this point, but in the cloud four system card, they reported blackmailing of the human, the setup was that the AI had access to the engineer's email.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While at the same time these weird behaviors pop up and then are suppressed. And we have seen in the COD four and in the GPT-5 system cards, COD4 reported, I think a two-thirds reduction in reward hacking. And in GPT-5, they reported a few different dimensions, but say something similar reduction in deceptive behavior. Those behaviors kind of just emerged. So it's sort of like weird behavior emerges, then they sort of figure out how to tamp it down, but not entirely. Presumably in the next generation, they'll tamp it down some more, but maybe some new additional weird behavior could emerge and then they'll have to kind of tamp that one down. All the while the tasks are expanding in scope with every four months doubling. So you could end up in a world where you can delegate really like major things to AIs, but there's some small”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of weird behaviors. With that comes this like scheming kind of stuff. We don't really have a great handle on that yet. There is also situational awareness that seems to be on the rise, right, where the models are like increasingly in their chain of thought, you're seeing things like, this seems like I'm being tested. Maybe I should be conscious of what my tester is really looking for here. And that makes it hard to evaluate models in tests because you don't know if they're actually going to behave the same way when they're out in the real world. So those I wouldn't say there's a high level or high confidence prediction, but one model of the future I've been playing with is the task length keeps doubling”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, that would suggest that you'll see a huge amount of automation in all kinds of different places. The other thing that I'm watching, though, is the reinforcement learning does seem to bring about a lot of bad behaviors. Reward hacking being one, you know, any sort of gap between what you are rewarding the model for and what you really want can become a big issue. We've seen this in coding in many cases where the AI will claw it as like notorious for this, will put out a unit test that always passes, you know, that just has return true in the unit test. Why is it doing that? Like, well, it must have learned that what we want is for unit tests that pass. We want it to pass unit tests. But we didn't mean to write fake unit tests that always pass, but that technically did satisfy the reward condition. And so we're seeing those kinds of.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That graph. Again, it's a little bit sort of apples to oranges because they've done a lot of scaffolding. How much have they broken it down? How much scaffolding are you allowed to do with these things before you sort of are off of their chart and onto maybe a different chart? But if you extrapolate that out a bit and you're like, okay, take the four-month case just to be a little aggressive. That's three doublings a year. That's 8x task length increase per year. That would mean you go from two hours now to two days in one year from now. And then if you do another 8x on top of that, you're looking at basically, say, two days to two weeks of work in two years. That would be a big deal, you know, to say the least if you could delegate an AI two weeks worth of work.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, broadly, I think it's the task length story from meter of the every seven months or every four months doubling time, we're at two hours-ish with GBT5. Repla just said their new agent V3 can go 200 minutes that if that's true, that would even be a new high point on the...”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is really mostly that there just wasn't a huge repository of data to train the robots on at first. And so you had to do a lot of hard engineering to make it work at all, you know, to even stand up, right? You had to have all these control systems and whatever, because there was nothing for them to learn from in the way that the language models could learn from the internet. But now that they're working at least a little bit, I think all these kind of refinement techniques are going to work. It'll be interesting to see if they can get the error rate low enough that I'll actually allow one in my house around my kids, that they'll probably be better deployed in factory settings first, more controlled environments than the chaos of my house, as you have seen in this recording. I do think they're going to work.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rough, you know, not very useful, but just enough at least to kind of get us going. Then we're in the game. And then once we're in the game, now we can do this flywheel thing of like, you know, rejection sampling, like have it try a bunch of times, take the ones where it succeeded, you know, refine-tune on that, the RLHF, you know, feedback, the sort of preference. Take two which one was better, fine-tune on that. the reinforcement learning, all these techniques that have been developed over the last few years seems to me they're absolutely going to apply to a problem like a humanoid robot as well. And that's not to say there won't be a lot of work to figure out exactly how to do that. But I think the big difference between language and robotics”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of inside view outside view, right? Inside view, you're like, there's always this minutia, there's always these problems that we had and things we had to solve. But you zoom out and it looks to me like the same basic pattern is working everywhere. And that is like if we can just gather enough data to do some pre-training, you know, some kind of raw.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, walk over all these obstacles. I mean, these are things that a few years ago they just couldn't do at all. They could barely balance themselves and walk a few steps under ideal conditions. Now you've got things that you can like literally do a flying kick and it'll like absorb your kick and shrug it off and just keep going, you know, write itself and continue on its way. Super rocky, you know, uneven terrain. All these sorts of things are getting quite good. You know, the same thing is working everywhere. I think the other thing that's kind of There's always a lot of detail to the work, so”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think people are often just kind of equating the chatbot experience with AI broadly. And that conflation will not last probably too much longer because we are going to see self-driving cars unless they get banned. And that's a very different kind of thing. And talk about your impact on jobs too, right? It's like, what, four or five million professional drivers in the United States? That is a big deal. don't think most of those folks are going to be super keen to learn to code. And even if they do learn to code, I'm not sure how long that's going to last. So that's going to be a disruption. And then general robotics is not that far behind, you know, the, and this is one area where I do think China might be actually ahead of the United States right now, but regardless of whether that's true or not, you know, these robots are getting really quite good, right?”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Previously unsolved engineering problems, like that's going to be a really powerful signal that they will be able to learn from. And now again, fold in those other modalities, right? The ability to have sort of a sixth sense for the space of small molecules, the space of proteins, you know, the space of material science possibilities, when you can bridge or unify the understanding of language and those other things, I think you start to have something that looks kind of like super intelligence, even if it's like not able to write poetry at a superhuman level necessarily. Its ability to see in these other spaces is going to be truly a superhuman thing that I think will be pretty hard to miss. You said that that was.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over at Tesla, over at SpaceX, like we're solving hard engineering problems on a daily basis, and they seem to be never ending. So when we start to give the next generation of the model these power tools, the same power tools that the professional engineers are using at those companies to solve those problems and the AI start to learn those tools and they start to solve.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have seen this play out with text and image where you had your text only models and you had your image only models and then they started to come together and now they've come really deeply together. And so I think you're going to see that across a lot of other modalities over time as well. And there's a lot more data there. I don't know what it means to like run out of data in the reinforcement learning paradigm. There's always more problems, right? There's always something to go figure out. There's always something to go engineer. Feedback is starting to come from reality, right? That was one of the things Elon talked about on the Croc4 launch was like, maybe we're running out of problems we've already solved. And we only have so much of those sitting around in inventory. We only have one internet. We only have so much of that stuff.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why is nobody crying about this? I think one of the things that's happening to our society in general is just so many things are happening at once. It's kind of the, it's like the flood the zone thing, except like there's so many AI developments flooding the zone that nobody can even keep up with all of those. And that's come from me, by the way, too. I would say two years ago, I was like pretty in command of all the news and a year ago I was starting to lose it. And now I'm like, wait a second, there was new antibiotics developed. I'm kind of missing things, you know, just like everybody else despite my best efforts. Key point there is AI is not synonymous with language models. There are AIs being developed with pretty similar architectures for a wide range of different modalities.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unified understanding that Bridges language and these other modalities. But even so, it's been enough for this group at MIT to use some of these relatively narrow purpose built biology models and create totally new antibiotics, new in the sense that they have a new mechanism of action, like they're affecting the bacteria in a new way. Notably, they do work on antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This is some of the first new antibiotics we've had in a long time. Now they're going to have to go through, when I say get the abundance department on it, it's like, where's my operation warp speed for these new antibiotics, right? Like we've got people dying in hospital.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, put text on top, progress since GPT 4, whatever we want to call it. GPT-5 is not a bust. And it'll spit that out. And you see that it has this deeply integrated understanding that bridges, language and image. And that's something that it can take in, but now it's also something you can put out as part of one core model with like a single unified intelligence. That, I think, is going to come to a lot of other things. We're at the point now with these biology models and material science models where they're kind of like the image generation models of a couple years ago. They can take a real simple prompt and they can do a generation, but they're not deeply integrated where you can have like a true conversation back and forth and have that kind of”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's not a language model. I think that's another thing people really underappreciate or that you could kind of look back at GPT 4 to 5 and then imagine a pretty easy extension of that. So GPT-4, initially when it launched, we didn't have image understanding capability. They did demo it at the time of the launch, but it wasn't released for some months later. The first version that we had could understand images, could do a pretty good job of understanding images, still with like jagged capabilities and whatever. Now with the new nanobanana from Google, you have this basically Photoshop level ability to just say, hey, take this thumbnail. Like we could take our two feeds right now, you know, take a snapshot of you, a snapshot of me, put them both into Nanobanana and say, generate the thumbnail for the YouTube preview featuring these two guys, put them in the same place, same background, whatever. It'll mash that up. You can even have it.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really fast changes. Others will be slower. Yeah, I mean, I kind of wish we had that slower path in front of us. My best guess, though, is that we will probably continue to see things that will be significant leaps and that there will be like actual disruption. Another one that's come to mind recently, you know, maybe we can get the abundance department on these new antibiotics. Have you seen this development?”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Half an hour to resolve tickets. We respond really fast. We respond in like under two minutes most of the time. But when we respond, you know, two minutes is still long enough that the person has gone on to do something else, right? It's the same thing as with the cursor thing that we were talking about earlier, right? They've tabbed over to something else. So now we get the response back in two minutes, but they are doing something else. So then they come back at minute six or whatever. Then they respond. But now our person has gone and done something else. So the resolution time, even for simple stuff, can be easily half an hour. And the AI, you know, it just responds instantly, right? So you don't have to have that kind of back and forth. You're just in and out. So I do think some of these categories could be.”
2025-10-14 · a16z Podcast · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source